The Dark Side of Transnational Latinidad: Narcocorridos and the Branding of Authenticity
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The dark side of transnational Latinidad: narcocorridos and the branding of authenticity Hector Amaya Associate Professor of Media Studies University of Virginia In Contemporary Latin@/Latin American Media, edited by Arlene Davila and Yeidy Rivero. New York University Press (forthcoming 2014). On October 20, 2011, Billboard put together the First Billboard Mexican Music Awards. The event was co-organized with Telemundo, the second largest Spanish-language television network in the United States. The Awards would recognize excellence in Billboard’s Regional Mexican Music category. Prior to 2011, Regional Mexican Music was recognized during the Billboard Latin Music Awards. Yet, as a testament to the sheer power of the Regional Mexican category, Billboard and Telemundo bet that the standalone ceremony would be a television and marketing success. They were correct. Five million people, almost 2.8 million adults in the coveted 18-49 demographic, saw the show. The ceremony also became one of the five highest ranked entertainment shows of 2011 for Telemundo, and won the ratings war in Los Angeles and Miami among men 18-34 (Cobo 2011). Billboard’s Regional Mexican category refers to a radio format that includes banda, norteño, mariachi, grupero and ranchera music. This format is the most popular among Mexican-Americans in the United States, due in part to the large number of immigrants from northern Mexico who reside in the United States. Cementing the category’s relevance is the fact that Regional Mexican accounts for more than 60% of sales in Billboard’s broader Latin Music category. By all these accounts and its success in Los Angeles, a city dominated by Mexican-Americans, and Miami, a city dominated by Cuban-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and immigrants from other Latin American nations, this ceremony was of huge significance to Latinos in the United States and to the media industries that court them (Cobo 2008). In 2011, the big winners of the Mexican Music Awards were Gerardo Ortiz, who took the six major awards, including Artist of The Year Award, and Jenni Rivera, who took home the Female Artist of the Year Award and a special award called El Premio de la Estrella for her positive influence beyond music. Ortiz’s awards were garnered for two very successful albums named after two narcocorrido hits: “Ni Hoy Ni Mañana” (“Not Today Nor Tomorrow”) and “Morir y Existir” (“To Die and To Exist”). Rivera got her awards for the imprint she has left throughout her career and for a double-disc collection called “Joyas Prestadas” (Fonovisa/Universal) in which she re-interpreted iconic Mexican ballads banda style. Speaking to the sustained success of these two artists, Ortiz and Rivera also dominated the 2012 Billboard Mexican Music Award ceremony. Ortiz received seven more Billboards, including Artist of the Year. Rivera repeated as the Female Artist of the Year and received two other awards. This article examines the convergence of Ortiz and Rivera in these two important award ceremonies, a convergence that will not be repeated. Rivera died in a plane crash in Mexico during the writing of this article and though sales of her music have skyrocketed, her success, from here on, will be posthumous and so will be her awards. Besides these two ceremonies, the careers of Ortiz and Rivera have two significant similarities, which are the reason for this article. First, their careers are intimately tied to narcocorridos, a style of music and lyrics that narrates the lives, deeds, and adventures of people engaged in drug traffic. Ortiz is today one of the most important narcocorrido singers. Rivera began her career as a narcocorrido singer and though over time she has shed off some of her connections to the narco imaginary, her original success was due to her ability to sing the narcocorrido from a female standpoint. Second, their personal brands and their brands’ circulation in the music industry harbor notions of authenticity that rely on mystifying claims about place and biography. Both singers are from California (Ortiz is from Pasadena; Rivera is from Long Beach), a place distant from the daily violence engendered by the cartels in Mexico, but this has not stop them from performing their narcocorridos in the first person, a narrative trope that helps give authenticity to a brand that aims to connect fans with experiences of violence. This article argues that just as the centenary magazine Billboard uses the industry term Regional Mexican to designate music that may or may not originate in Mexico, Ortiz and Rivera constitute their commercial identities in relation to a fictitious imaginary in which identity, place, and consumption are central to authenticity. Considering their efforts to highlight their connection to Mexico and the manner their music circulates with their fans who, for instance, regularly comment that Ortiz sings “la pura verdad” (“the real truth”), authenticity matters. Their efforts to construct the narcocorrido brand and Billboard’s Mexican Regional term call attention to the problems of validating this hugely successful music genre among Mexican-American fans even though the narcocorrido is bound to Mexico and to experiences of violence. Narcocorridos and the branding of authenticity There is a parallelism between singers who, like Ortiz and Rivera, embody a narco- identity while claiming to be from Culiacan or Sinaloa, and Billboard’s use of the term Regional Mexican to classify and brand narcocorridos. The deployment of a narco-identity and place are essential to a ‘brand culture’ that hides the deterritorialized character of the music industry today. As Sarah Banet-Weiser posits, brand culture refers to the process by which the converging relationships between marketing, a product, and consumers “become cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity, and affective relationships” (2012, 3). Claiming thus that embodiment and place are central to the branding of artists and media genres that give industrial meaning to the term narcocorrido is more than claiming that place has become commoditized. In our contemporary culture, branding is central to the meanings we give to cultural experiences and hence branding is not only about capitalism but it is also, as Banet-Weiser notes, about identity. The claims of Mexicanity and the way performers like Ortiz and Rivera have embodied the narco-brand are thus not only commercial tactics. They are also the means by which Mexican-American urban youth, who are the typical consumers of narcocorridos, reconfigure their marginalization through the tactical deployment of counter-hegemonic fantasies that narcocorridos activate, even if these fantasies simultaneously stress the deterritorialized character of the music. Deterritorialization here is more than simply the lack of ground or locality; it is also the cultural ruse that underscores the music’s lack of responsiveness to social conditions in Mexico and/or the United States and a tactic consumers use to connect to fantasies of power and sufficiency. Connecting narcocorrido performers, urban Mexican-American youth, and transnational music corporations like Billboard is a relatively simple truth: The narco brand is all about authenticity, and this is not an oxymoron. Banet-Weiser (2012) notes the relevant connections that branding has with authenticity in contemporary culture. [“The] process of branding,” she writes, “impacts the way we understand who we are, how we organize ourselves in the world, what stories we tell ourselves about ourselves” (5). Branding is thus essential to self-identity. Thus, branding becomes intertwined with the personal and social processes by which we define our authentic self, including the social practices, objects, and knowledges that can yield, for us and, often, to us, an aura of authenticity. Not all practices, objects, or knowledges do this and part of the labor of being a functioning modern individual lies in learning to recognize the meaning of authenticity in practices, objects, and knowledges (7). One of the most significant lessons in Banet- Weiser’s work is that the relationship of branding to capitalism does not preclude capitalism from being part of the social processes by which people legitimately construct authenticity, even of this authenticity is built though consumption (8). In a world where social relations are often commercial, the authentic and the commercial cannot be opposites. Authenticity and the branding of authenticity can be seen as overlapping processes. This means that the narco brand can indeed be about authenticity and the question then is: how is the branding of authenticity achieved in narco-culture? And, for whom is this branding useful? Banet-Weiser points out that some categories of life are particularly susceptible to be conceived as authentic, and these categories include self-identity, politics, creativity, and religious experiences. As I show in this and the following sections, the narco brand connects self-identity to politics and this is possible because of the cultural labor of performers, consumers, and institutions. The use of culture as politics is a learned process that helps individuals interpret their lives in relationship to some social transactions that take meaning through the lens of power. The political is not a pre-given category of life, but it is the part of our lives that, through a particular optic, becomes subject to power. Because it is learned, the political is the result of social processes that rely on the semantic actions of institutions. Hence, the political underpinnings of the narco brand are experienced in relationship to identity, but depend on broad institutional support and affirmation. It is this interrelation that defines the connection between narcocorrido performers, Mexican- American urban youth, and Billboard. How is it that this connection came to depend on and be defined by experiences of power? What are narcocorridos if not folklore? The narcocorrido connects to power because it belongs to narrative traditions historically connected to a counter-hegemonic stand.